How To Drive Traffic To Your Directory Site

There are many important steps to do when starting your directory project. You need to get your branding right, position yourself uniquely among the crowd, design and develop a website, fill it up with listings and other things. But setting up a directory site is only half the battle won.

After you have set up a site, you would need to drive traffic to it. Getting initial traction is always going to be difficult for a new site. A good directory is in good demand. But how will you initially grow traffic to a directory and maintain it is the challenge.

In this article,we will discuss few digital marketing strategies which should help you to get traffic to your site.

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We will cover the following:

SEO

Content Marketing

Social Media Marketing

Video Marketing

Infograhic

SEO

A directory that doesn’t come up in search results is of no use. Your users are going to pay only if your website ranks in Google and bring them organic traffic. So, SEO should be correctly incorporated in a site right from the beginning.

To begin with make sure your site loading time is low. A slower site will put off your user and will increase your bounce rate which will negatively impact your SEO. If you’re using Inventory Theme, you can be assured of a faster loading time.

Another important thing while creating a directory website is your architecture. You should do a thorough keywords research on the categories and locations. There should be a minimum demand of your category services in your location. After you recognized the keywords, you use them in titles and html tags. So, that it tells Google what keywords you’re trying to rank for.

After you’re done with your keyword research, do a proper SEO set up. Some of the things in your checklist should be:

1. Proper optimization of keywords

2. Interlinking between pages

3. Google Console and Bing WebMaster tools creation

4. Site Map submission

5. Set up google analytics

6. Optimize your robot.txt file

7. Optimize your site for mobile

8. Optimize for conversion on your landing pages

Apart from technical and on-page seo, backlinks are another important factor. You can initially build links by releasing a press release, joining local business association and from other existing relationships.

As your site grow old, you have to actually develop a link building plan. Guest posting is one of the easiest way to build relationships and backlinks.

Content Marketing

If we’re discussing SEO in 2018, how can content marketing be left behind? Content marketing if done right can drive organic visitors to your site. But you must have a plan. You can’t simply generate content and expect visitors to grow.

A great hack while producing content while your directory website is know is to create a list of industry specific long tail keywords. If your directory site is location specific then you can also create location specific guides. I have seen many directory successfully doing this.

Social Media Marketing

Social media can be a great tool to increase your reach. Initially you may have to spend a few bucks to reach out to your target audience. But if done correctly it's worth it. Facebook ads is a great platform to reach your potential audience. The biggest advantage it offers is through its targeting. You can target specific user types of your niche.

Run multiple ads and target narrow audience. Do A/B testing. Run each ads for a couple of days then have a look at the results. the benefits. If any ad is performing badly and it seems waste of money, just shut it down. Scale the ad which performs well.

Video Marketing

Promoting your brand with video ads another great tactics to grab new visitors and customers. Professional ads video works better than slideshow video. You can produce some slideshow videos to show how your brand work. I recommend to promote 30 sec clips via YouTube and Facebook.

Video ads perform better in this present days then image or GIF animations. People loves to share mini video clips rather then other graphic items. Luckily if your video goes viral then your one video is worth your all investment.

Infographic Submission

People loves to see some informational graphic related to your business. As a directory website, you can create a lot of interesting infographic related to your industry and location.

There are a lot of Infographic submission websites where you can submit your infographics.

Here are some popular Websites where you can submit your infographics: